By the time of her subjective tricentennial, Sondra Alizond-1 was a self-made trillionaire. In fact, as a board member of the Hector SystemBank, she was worth nearly a million slow dollars—a sum that beggars the imagination. Of course, it took a century of hard work for her to amass that fortune: first as a semiskilled crew member aboard the Andromache, then as a construction hand laboring the first colony habs to take shape in the inner belt of Gliese 581c4, then as a founder and planner of the first authentication handshake to take place between Hector Beacon and its neighboring star systems, once there were sufficient resources to spare for construction of the first interstellar beacon transceivers . . . one would hesitate to call her life easy.
Which is why, I suppose, she invested much of her wealth in the New California, a vastly expensive permanent spacegoing ark. Like a stellar colony in its own right, an ark (a self-propelled world-ship with a population of millions) also needs a bank. Then, a couple of centuries later, long after she established herself as one of the ruling oligarchs of the spacefaring nation, long after she founded her estate on the shore of the Inner Sea . . . Sondra became bored with her comforts. And that’s when she started to sculpt her personality and study new skills, partitioning and editing her identity and spawning second-generation sibs—sisters like me.
I went directly from the Gravid Mother’s cell to the classical sarcophagus in which Lady Cybelle was enjoying her integrative metamorphosis. It was indeed running short of isotonic polyhexose solution and methanoclass="underline" I saw to it, then attended to the various other chores dictated by my talking belt-side tyrant. In all I spent over twenty-eight hours scurrying around, tying down loose fittings and polishing the bones in the walls, on my own for the most part but occasionally sharing a chore with a silent, cadaverous partner.
While so engaged, I secured 406 items and cleaned 18 compartments, rooms, tanks, cells, and other storage spaces. I also had an opportunity to study Gould’s silent servitors. Father Gould had taken several of the Fragile skeletons and animated them by means of head-mounted sensors and compact motors wired into each joint. Just powerful enough to move in low gravity, and sized for human-body-scale tasks, it was an elegant solution to the shortage of unskilled hands—but one that required constant supervision, for the revenants lacked any onboard intelligence. They were no more than motorized husks, controlled by the will of a living taskmaster.
All this time we were in free fall. Occasional impulses shoved the walls, floors, or ceilings gently toward me: The chapel intermittently rotated this way and that, so that the main engine was pointed away from anything that could be damaged by the exhaust fluxion.
Toward the end of my shift, as I double-checked the bolts that held the pews to the floor of the nave, a mournful tonk sounded from the tower above me. It was the noise of a muffled clapper banging against a tied-down bell. I looked down in time to see the floor rising slowly toward my feet and watched, fascinated, for the several seconds it took to reach my outstretched toes. I didn’t weigh very much; a flick of the ankles, and I could float halfway to the roof, hanging in midair for tens of seconds. But eventually I fell back down again. We were clearly under way at last, and the acceleration, although low, would be sustained for tens or hundreds of days.
There were no crashing, tinkling sounds, telltale indications of unsecured assets. Nor were there ominous creaking or grumbling noises, indicative of more dangerous structural instabilities in the stack of stone and wood and bone above my head that had now entered the powered flight regime. This should, I suppose, have made me happy; but I was just relieved to have left Taj Beacon behind. Ahead of me was Shin-Tethys and Ana: Behind me, before Taj, there was the difficult situation on Ganesh. That, too, was vanishing into the distant past—almost nine standard years had elapsed while I was frozen in transmission. Before that, there was the sticky business on Rosen Beacon, six light-years previously. (I spent almost a year there—found employment, bought and furnished a small and cozy apartment, began tentatively attempting to make friends. I would have abandoned this whole foolish quest, except that . . .)
I shook myself out of my reverie and picked up the talking box. “Krina here,” I said, absently flexing my fingertip chromatophores to force the cleaner’s grime out of my skin: “We are now under acceleration, so I assume preflight lockdown is complete. What do I do next?”
“Krina, lockdown is confirmed complete. Please traverse Aisle One and identify and secure any debris. Please traverse—”
“No,” I said firmly. I’d been working for over thirty hours, and I was becoming tired. I was cold and hungry, and my mind was wandering: a sure sign that I needed to schedule some sleeptime. I may not need to eat every few hours lest I starve like a Fragile, but I have my limits. “Box, I need to rest. Where do I get food and bedding around here?”
“Krina, meal breaks occur every six hours. Next meal break commences in eighteen minutes . . .” Now it told me. I stuffed the box into my utility belt and went in search of the refectory. I assumed it was the big room I’d found earlier—or was that the kitchen? “Thirty hours on; I must be in credit for at least six hours and thirty minutes off,” I muttered to myself as I heel-and-toed along a twilit corridor of stone arches with interlocking fan vaults to support the ceiling.
An ancient chapel of the classic design begins and ends on planetary bedrock, with little scope for underground facilities. But a chapel of the Church of the Fragile is barely the top percentile of the enterprise; everything of any significance happens below the ground line. This includes the accommodation and mess deck, as I believe it is called, which is sandwiched precariously between the crypt and the navigation/command deck, which in turn squats atop the maintenance spaces, the supply fabricators and feedstock mass, and, finally, the vast fuel and reaction-mass tanks that feed the reactor and propulsion system.
I found it a bewildering maze at first—if not for the talking box I would have been unable to find my way around it—but eventually I located the small cell that Dennett told me I could claim for myself, and from there it was not hard to orient myself and work out the way to the refectory. Which was apparently not a “mess” (that term is not used in a church even though it is located on the mess deck) but the ecclesiastical equivalent.